Mined from the notebooks. August 12, 2016. Posted Saturday morning, November 12.

Here’s another one that’d been stuck in a notebook like yesterday's, but for a little less time, only since mid-August. When I thought it up back in August, I thought I was being merely clever with the title. Seems like a cruel joke now, doesn't it? But that's one of the reasons I'm posting it now, to show how wrong I was and yet how, unfortunately, I may also have been right.

I kept putting off posting it for several reasons. One was I kept thinking I needed to dig out some more quotes from David McCollough's biography of Harry Truman and other history books and re-read Susan Fromberg Shaeffer's Vietnam War novelBuffalo Afternoon. As the editors like to brag around here, you can’t say we don’t do our homework at the Mannionville Blog Shoppe and Wonkery. Another reason was that I wanted to save it for a day when I thought it wouldn’t hurt so much to think about because of the third reason. There’s a heart-sinking conclusion. I discouraged myself writing this and I was hesitant about passing along my discouragement. I started off having fun writing it but as I went along I realized where it was headed and, frankly, I didn’t want to face it. I’m posting it now because how much more discouraged can we get and, sadly, it’s now even more heart-sinkingly relevant.

I’ve broken it into three parts.The heart-sinking begins at the end of Part Two and continues through Part Three.

Colonel Potter puts his jeep out of its misery after Frank Burns runs over it with a tank in the episode “Hey Doc” from Season 4 of M*A*S*H.

My first academic boss, the chair of the English department when I started teaching, was a Vietnam combat vet.

Not that you’d have thought that looking at him. Twenty-odd years away from his service in-country, bald and pushing fifty, smiling and gently sardonic, with a big black mustache that combined with his glasses and prominent nose made him look like a lost grandson of Groucho, he didn’t remind you at a glance or even after long and careful study of the eighteen year old kid he once was, slogging sweaty and shirtless through rice paddies with an M1 across his shoulders and a look of terror he claimed never left his eyes.

He was a good boss, and not just for an academic. I admired how he put and kept just the right distance between himself and us young instructors and grad assistants. Never aloof, never chummy. Congenial. Collegial. Open to our ideas, understanding of our concerns and problems but definitely in charge.

We were never close, but we were friendly, and he kept tabs on me and my progress as a teacher and let me know when he thought I was doing well...and when I wasn’t doing so well. One of my fondest memories, actually, is of a time when he let me know I wasn’t doing so well.

I’d neglected some paperwork and caused some bureaucratic snafu---I’ve forgotten the details, conveniently, but whatever it was I did or didn’t do, he wasn’t happy about it. He didn’t get mad, exactly, but he was stern and earnest in making me understand I’d screwed up and I’d better fix things right now. “You get on that today, young man,” he said.

I was chagrined but I still wanted to laugh. I loved the way he called me “young man.” Made me feel very young and truly grown up at the same time. It was how his tone implied that I was still barely more than a kid in his eyes but at the same time enough more than a kid that being young was no longer an excuse for my goofing up in life.

Like I said, you wouldn’t have thought it to look at him that he’d been over there and you might not have ever known it from talking to him. He almost never talked about it. At least not with me. I remember it only coming up once. A new novel about Vietnam had just been published, Buffalo Afternoon by Susan Fromberg Schaeffer, and Larry was going around the department telling everybody who would listen that it was the best book ever published about being an infantryman in Vietnam.

I listened.

I was a little bit sorry I did. Because it earned me a long and graphic disquisition on Tropical phagedena.

Jungle rot.

It seems that the reason he thought Buffalo Afternoon was such a good war book was it was the only one he’d read that got the foot soldier’s foot problems right. Schaffer, according to Larry, had conveyed exactly how awful it was to go for days on patrol in the jungle without being able to take off your soggy boots and wet socks that never dried out, not even when you went to sleep. To illustrate his point, Larry described the time he finally got to take his boots and socks off after a long patrol. His disintegrating and reeking socks had glued themselves to his feet and legs and when he peeled them off they came away in strips and with them came strips of skin. The stink wasn’t the socks or just the socks. It was his own rotting flesh.

That description above of himself in the rice paddies comes from my memory of his disquisition on foot care and that’s the point here, or, really, the beginning of the point.

What he told me about jungle rot explained something I didn’t know until that moment I needed explained. But when I heard it, something clicked and I said to myself, Oh, so that’s why! Why being why the TV show M*A*S*H. devoted the subplots of two episodes to foot care.

In one, titled “Hey Doc”, a British officer comes to the 4077th to get surreptitiously treated for an ingrown toenail by American doctors who might be amenable to a bribe to keep it off his medical record. The British Army’s very strict about foot care---with good reason, I suddenly understood, having simply accepted it as another one of those loveably comic eccentricities movies and TV shows have taught us to expect from the Brits when I’d first seen the episode a dozen years or so before Larry told me his jungle rot story. Naturally the military brass would obsess over the foot care of its foot soldiers---and he’s worried that the word might get back to his superiors. Hoping to escape a reprimand, he asks Hawkeye and BJ to keep his visit a secret. They’re happy to oblige, but the fee for their service is two bottles of five year old Scotch, which go on to figure ironically in the main plot of the episode about a sniper attack that culminates with Frank driving a tank over Colonel Potter’s jeep.

In the other episode, “Dear Ma”, Hawkeye gives foot inspections to the officers of the 4077th, and that’s the episode that’s important here.

When it’s Colonel Potter’s turn, Hawkeye is impressed by Potter’s podiatric hygiene and compliments him on it. Potter responds with his typical matter-of-factness:

Col. Potter: I learned about foot care in World War I from Captain Harry S Truman, no less. He had a great pair of feet.

Hawkeye, typically, is quick with the riposte:

Hawkeye: Imprints of which may be found on General MacArthur's backside.

Now, Truman really could have given Potter instructions on proper foot care because Truman really was in the army in World War I. He had enlisted in the Missouri National Guard in 1905. He cheated on the eye exam to get in. When the United States entered the war in 1917, he re-enlisted---this time he talked the army doctor into giving him a pass on the eye exam. (I like to imagine the doctor was a young fellow Missourian named Sherman Potter.) Truman’s Guard unit was merged into the army and, despite his terrible eyesight, he became the commander of an artillery unit in France where he saw action in some of the bloodiest fighting of that very bloody war. After the Armistice he served as a major in the reserves for over twenty years and after Pearl Harbor he tried to return to active duty, even though he was by then a fifty-seven year old United States Senator. President Roosevelt moved to prevent all sitting members of Congress from going off to fight. I’m not sure how Congressman Lyndon Johnson was able to “serve” in the Navy. But Truman stayed in the Senate where he made the national reputation as the bane of war profiteers that would lead to his becoming FDR’s last vice-president and then president himself.

In case you don’t know, Colonel Potter had enlisted in the cavalry when he was fifteen. (“Lied about my age. Had big thighs when I was a boy.”) I don’t know how and when he wound up in medical school. Probably around the usual age. I don’t think his age at the time of the Korean War was ever stated specifically, but I’d guess he was meant to have been around sixty, Harry Morgan’s age when he joined the cast of MASH. That would have made Potter about thirty in 1917. Truman was only thirty-four then but I like to imagine him calling Potter “young man” the way Potter sometimes called Hawkeye “young man” and “son” and the way my department chair called me “young man” that time.

All this is fun for me to recall, but the reason I’m passing it along to you is that Newt Gingrich, one of Donald Trump’s chief surrogate liars, posted a Tweet last week comparing Trump to Harry Truman. [Editor’s note: Remember, this was written in August. Newt’s Tweet was posted on August 11.] Gingrich wrote:

Republicans who are sure Trump can't win should read history of Truman's 1948 campaign. Pollsters were off by 9 to 19 percent.

Any comparison of Donald Trump to Harry Truman that is at all flattering to Trump is an insult to Truman. But Truman’s ghost is probably resigned to being insulted in this way. Since 1948 every political candidate who’s down in the polls invokes Truman. There has been no worse human being to run as a major party’s nominee for President than Donald Trump---Richard Nixon had to be president to become a worse human being than Trump---but there have been plenty of rogues, scoundrels, and villains at least as bad who have run for just about every other office you can name, federal, state, and local, and every one of them, finding themselves behind in the polls has compared themselves to Truman. The idea is that if Harry could defy the polls and expectations and pull off a win at the last moment just by giving ‘em hell, so can they.

So Gingrich’s claiming kinship with Truman on Trump’s behalf is one of the few instances of politicking like a normal candidate we’ve seen coming out of that campaign. He was exhorting the faithful to stay faithful and not lose hope. And if he’d left it there, I’d have had nothing more to write about and I’d have been done with this nostalgia trip. But Newt didn’t leave off there. He tweeted more on the subject, and of course Newt being Newt, that is a liar from way back, and being what he is, like I said, one of Trump’s chief surrogate liars, his next Tweets were based on a fundamental lie, pitched at the suckers who want to believe that Donald Trump is somebody and something a whole lot better than he is. A straight-talking, no-nonsense, getter of things done who’ll take no shit from anyone and stand up for what’s right no matter what. Somebody like…

Harry Truman.

And the idea that Donald Trump is at all like Harry Truman is a YUGE lie. But along with it, I’ve come to realize, there’s a heart-sinking truth, and it begins with this from David McCollough's Truman:

Efforts to explain why the impossible had happened [Truman's defeating Dewey in the election of 1948] began at once, as did, understandably, a great deal of soul searching among reporters, editors, and broadcasters who had fallen down on the job so very conspicuously.

To H.L. Mencken, who delighted in the outcome exactly because it shook the bones of all...[the] smarties," the answer was simply in the contrast of the two contestants as they presented themselves to the voters. "Neither candidate made a speech on the stump that will survive in the schoolbooks, but those of Truman at least had warmth in them," wrote Mencken in one of his last columns, at the close of a long career of appraising the American political scene. "While Dewey was intoning essays sounding like the worst bombast of university professors, Truman was down on the ground, clowning with circumabient morons. He made votes every time he gave a show, but Dewey lost them."